4. Giving feedback on students‟
performances. Although many learners made
progress in their pronunciation and grammar, more still needed to work
on them. Some students seemed to be over-
sensitive about feedback given to them.
5. Giving handouts as daily
materials. Some students lost their handouts.
6. Giving tangible rewards to
active students. Some students were not interested in
joining classroom activities. A few students did not give their
contribution during group activities.
1. Planning a
Using Comic Strips in the Teaching and Learning Process of Speaking
The teacher planned to vary the speaking tasks using comic strips to ensure that the students would not get bored with them. This would make them do the
tasks with enthusiastically. As we know, a printer has a number of q
uality settings, ranging from „draft‟ to „best quality‟. Somehow the pictures did not look clear because the researcher
chose the moderate quality setting. In this case, the researcher intended to fix them immediately by using the highest quality setting which was possible for her
model of printer. In the following meeting the blurry pictures would have been sharper.
In the cycle 2, the comic strips used would have more panels. By having more panels the storyline would be clearer so it would be easier for students to
comprehend and retell the story. Adding panels also meant adding the number of
pictures. By doing this, the students would be happy as they were more likely to be interested in pictures than texts.
a Establishing Rapport
The researcher kept establishing rapport like what she did in Cycle 1 since it was a key to effectively manage the classroom. But, in Cycle 2 she would use the
students‟ names more often so they would stick in her memory better. The sooner she could learn the names of all students the sooner she could build a good
relationship with them.
b Conducting Pre-Communicative Activities
The researcher kept conducting pre-communicative activities before communicative activities with some improvements. Like in cycle 1, those
included vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation practices. The vocabulary tasks would be kept attractive with a lot of pictures. Also,
the researcher would explain the difficult words first rather than giving direct translation to the students.
In cycle 2, the students kept doing grammar practices as some of them still had difficulties related to the use of simple past tense. They still confused to
differentiate regular and irregular verbs so the researcher would create more challenging activities to improve their grammatical competencies.
Regarding pronunciation, the researcher would put more attention to it due to the result of reflection in cycle 1 that the majority of the students still
mispronounced certain words.In this case, the researcher tried to encourage students to improve their pronunciation as much as possible. Drilling words and
reading aloud like what had been done in cycle 1 would still be conducted. The researcher intended to speak more slowly in pronouncing wordsphrasessentences
while the students would listen and repeat the words again and again till the pronunciations were smooth, natural, and understandable to the listeners. To
maximize the pronunciation practices, the researcher planned to expose the students to perfect pronunci
ation by using Cambridge Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary installed on her laptop and downloading relevant authentic materials
from the internet such as English songs and videos. Hopefully, the students improved their pronunciations after several practices. In this case, bringing
something extraordinary to classroom was believed to improve their motivation in learning pronunciation.
c Giving feedback on the students‟ performances
It is important for teachers to monitor students‟ performances and give them
feedback. Through feedback, students could see how well they were doing. Feedback would be given on the base of individual, group, and class work. In
giving feedback, the researcher focused on students‟ progress rather than mistakes otherwise the students would be discouraged.
d Giving handouts daily material
In the cycle 2, the researcher kept the handouts well-organized and to thepoint. Also, she made them more appealing to the
students‟ eyes by inserting a lot of pictures. She made them fun and exciting for students. But, it was still not
cost-feasible to give colorful handouts for all students in the classroom so the researcher prepared black and white handouts for them.
e Giving tangible rewards to the active students
In the previous cycle, the researcher rewarded the students by smiling and praising the students whenever they tried their best in doing the task given. In the
cycle 2, the researcher would also give smiley face stickers as another way to reward them. Later, some students who got many stickers would get prizes from
her. It would motivate the students to learn more since it gave them a sense of achievement. They knew how well they were doing.
2. Action Observation
